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Back in October, I wrote about the legendary Halloween Havoc 1997 Mask vs. Title match between Eddie Guerrero and Rey Mysterio Jr. I was—I am—fascinated with the match as a unit of time, a breathtaking display of groundbreaking wrestling and emotionally gutwrenching storytelling that does more in 14 minutes than most wrestlers do across…
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Winter Is Coming, last week’s MEGA Dynamite that featured not just the beginning of one of the most ambitious angles in wrestling history, but the launch of an AEW/Impact Wrestling crossover that may end up involving AAA, NJPW, DDT, FMW, and any number of other companies by the time it’s finished, ended on Don…
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It’s Thanksgiving Day in America, which used to be a pretty big occasion for professional wrestling. WWE’s Survivor Series began as a “Thanksgiving tradition,” running the day of from 1987-1990, and the day before from 1991-1994, which makes a certain amount of sense considering the day’s status as a national holiday marked by cornball…
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After a successful Full Gear pay per view that effectively reset the board for All Elite Wrestling, this week’s episode of Dynamite took the airwaves to do more of that work, offering teases at the future, surprise returns, and a number of matches that had could have justified a spot on Full Gear, but…
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One of my mentors, Roger Ebert, once drew criticism in 2008 for writing an entire review about a film he saw about eight minutes of. The film, Tru Loved, was an indie drama about a girl who moves to suburbia with her lesbian parents, and Ebert, having watched and reviewed thousands of films, many of…
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Last night’s AEW Dynamite started inauspiciously, with news that Joey Janela had been pulled from the show due to exposure to a wrestler who tested positive for COVID-19. Testing is not the tight net sports leagues believe it to be—the virus takes effect over a variable number of days, and even if all of…
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“There shouldn’t be any wrestling right now.” Outside of an acknowledgement of the NBA suspending its (now concluded) season and the WWE moving an episode of SmackDown from Detroit to the WWE Performance Center, this is the first sentence I wrote about professional wrestling in what we’re probably going to call “the COVID era,”…
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I don’t need to tall you about how amped I was for this week’s dog collar match between Brodie Lee and Cody Rhodes—I already wrote a whole article about it. Instead, lets place the focus of this week’s introduction where AEW wants it, despite booking a dog collar match on the same show—Chris Jericho’s…
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I haven’t had a lot to look forward to in wrestling lately. Eddie Kingston’s AEW debut and later title match, yeah. Yano Season, yes. Roman Reigns’ first title defense against Jey Uso, of course. But beyond that, the grim specter of 2020 has cast a pall on everything I’d otherwise be hyped up about—there’ve…
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AEW gave us three hours of Dynamite this week, a largely consequence-free hour of “Late Night Dynamite” tagged to the end of the NBA playoffs on Tuesday, and the regular two hour show on Wednesday night. “Consequence-free” is not a criticism—I was raised on weekend wrestling, one hour WCW shows on TBS and syndicated…